The right kind of ‘secular state’ – a Christian perspective

We have posted previously on both the CORAB report and the recent secularist response. In this guest post, Jonathan Chaplin, Director of the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics, responds to the latter. This article is an extended version of a KLICE Comment published by the Kirby Laing Institute on 20 January 2017 and shortly to be cross-posted at Public Spirit.

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On 17 January the University of Warwick released A Secularist Response to the Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life[1] It is offered as a ‘critical counterweight’ (p3) to the Commission’s report Living with Difference: Community, Diversity and the Common Good published in December 2015. The CORAB report proposed a ‘new settlement’ on the place of religion in public life in view of the current rapid shifts in religious allegiance and identity in British society, including the decline in membership of mainline Christian denominations and the significant growth of those adhering to no religion and to new minority religions. It argues that this growing de facto plurality ought to be better accommodated in the de jure institutional and constitutional status of religion and belief and reflected in public policy. It projected an appealing ‘vision … of a society at ease with itself … in which [all] feel at home as part of an ongoing national story … [and] to which all … wish to, and are encouraged to, contribute … to the common good’ (Living With Difference, p11). The report unleashed many vigorous responses, including many from Christians, several of which, in my view, were hasty and dismissive. Continue reading